Selkie335

Just want to share this: a Selkie reader emailed me the other day to let me know that, motivated by the strip as well as real-life accounts which include their own, they created a petition on We the People against zero-tolerance policies. Thought I’d share it for anyone else that would like to sign a petition against this sort of thing.

Discussion (57) ¬

Hence why my school district has ruled out suspensions. Since 2010 (start of my senior year) all suspensions were in-school, lessening the awesomeness of not going to class. Luckily my suspension occurred in 2008. So I got an extended Christmas vacation. FD

I wonder how many other districts are no longer using suspension as a form of punishment…

I had in house suspensions, as they were referred to there, in my high school. They were in that school as early as 2004 though. Probably a good while before then.

I had them a lot. Still wasn’t really much of a punishment. All they had us do is any homework we still had for that day. Then, they didn’t give a crap. In house suspensions helped me fix my sleep deficit during the years I had teachers that didn’t let me sleep in class, or finish my lunch from my sweatshirt pocket. Actually those teachers were the ones sending me there anyway.

Even better, dude who usually supervised the suspensions let you listen to music if you used headphones. It’s like they wanted us to get in trouble.

This is why they do “in-school suspensions” now. They realized that letting you stay home and do whatever isn’t really a punishment, so they stick you in the library for the whole day filing books or something.

Technically the idea behind suspensions was that the parents would implement some form of punishment, likely grounding. Think about if parents actually do that, and the child has to spend a week doing nothing, not even being allowed to hang out with their friends at school. But too many parents don’t punish their kids (when they’ve done something worth punishment), making suspension a vacation for most.

Suspension was never a punishment. It put you behind, but usually, the kids who worked hard at getting it didn’t care and when you got it, you got vacation from the very thing you hated. Never could understand why anyone thought it was anything more than admission that the people in control, weren’t and were just sweeping the problems under the rug in the hopes no-one would notice.

At one point, there was an assumption of an in-home parent, who would be upset that you got in trouble at school, to give extra chores, lectures, remove treats, grounding, informing extended family and getting them on “What were you thinking!?” bandwagon, and in general make suspension unpleasant. None of those assumptions are often correct anymore.

That was indeed the case for me when I started racking up the punishments in grade school. But then my parents caught on that the principal was just piling the punishments on me because I was convienient, not because I was choosing to cause trouble. So my parents eased up on me.

It’s not always the case of the parents being apathetic, sometimes it’s just the opposite.

Well in my school, kids started acting like that, so they responded by giving them in school suspensions. Basically they stuck you in a windowless room, next to the principal’s office and made you do homework all day and brought you lunch. After a week of that you didn’t want to go back.

Well it’s not like Todd is going to give her extra chores, remove treats, etc, like someone else mentioned. I guess sometimes “Zero Tolerance” works out for the victim after all. (probably not as often in real life, but sometimes)

It is actually worse for working parents. They have take time off work to take care of the child, hire a daytime baby-sister or trust a kid to stay home by themselves (not sure what age that would be considered legal). If you leave the kid at home you are trusting the same child who got in trouble in the first place.

When I was a kid, my mom told me that you could stay home alone at 11 and babysit at 12. I remember being in grade 5 and staying home alone when I was sick… If I’d been seriously ill I bet she’d have stayed home from work, but I wasn’t running a fever or anything, I’d just thrown up the night before and wasn’t feeling 100% so she let me skip school. I think she was actually the one who suggested that I stay home. Gotta love the trust my mom had in me. That day is actually a really good memory for me of my mom, because (unfortunately) my pet rat died in my arms that day. I called my mom while it was happening, and she came straight home to comfort me. She found a matchbox for a coffin, wrapped her in flannel, buried her in the front garden and sang a song over her grave before going back to work. Despite the unhappy events that led up to it, I’ll always remember how she didn’t even hesitate to come when I needed her.

But yeah, suspensions are really more of a punishment for the parents than the kids. I think at this point most kids have either 2 working parents or only 1 parent who of course has to work. This probably has more to do with the change to in-school suspensions, rather than the issue of kids enjoying their break.

While I would happily support a petition to abolish zero tolerance rules in schools I didn’t sign this one. I dislike petition sites that require you to “sign up” or “make an account” because they tend to then spam you with other petitions they want you to sign. Also, I am sorry to say I didn’t find this one very well written. It would be far more effective if the author were to link it to (or at least cite) one of the many studies that have been done showing how such policies don’t help. Perhaps linking to (or at least mentioning) one of the many cases that have been documented in the press showing the ridiculous extremes to which such policies have been used to “punish” children who have done nothing wrong or disruptive would give the petition more weight as well.

That’s why schools in my area had In School Suspension. I never went but I had to drop by that room a few times it was like isolation. All of the desks were facing the wall with little partitions on either side so the students couldn’t hold conversations, and they had to spend all day doing the classwork and homework as the rest of the class only they didn’t get full credit for it.

Somewhat reminds me of the one time in high school I got a detention. They finally got around to handing them out to people who had accrued too many tardies (hey, hanging out with my boyfriend between classes was important!), so there were a lot of people who had to serve detention that day. It was like a big after-school party with friends, and then they made us quiet down. We could do whatever, as long as it was individual work and school-related. I got a bunch of homework done in those 40 minutes and then went home. Best punishment ever.

Ah, Sandy is such a practical little person. Fond as I am of Amanda, and I honestly am strongly sympathetic to her in her sorrows, I still cherish the faint and distant hope that Sandy’s complexion is not a coincidence and the plot is more tangled than we yet know.

Also: “sniffs squonk” I believe Todd will want to get a clean jacket before he goes back to work. But I suspect he knew parenthood would require some appalling stresses on his wardrobe. Of course it might be a waterproof jacket and could be cleaned off with a tissue and a handful of snow… No wait! If Selkie’s spit causes a rash what does her snot do?? Todd, watch out! Your jacket could be lethal!!

For once the hobbit is right, a suspension is not a reward. . . but it isn’t a punishment either. As any school kid will tell you the real punishment comes when you have to go home and tell your parents why they need to pay for a babysitter for the next week. Selkie can go “Yeeeehaaaw!” because she already knows how Todd feels about her punishment – he’s on her side.

yes out of school suspension can be fun. However when I was in high school. We had something called ‘in school suspension’ it’s where you sit in a room all day and do absolutely nothing for several hours. You can’t talk, you can’t listen to music you can either read or do school work but that’s it.

My district offers both in-school and out-of-school suspensions, though with OOS detentions all homework that is to be handed out over the time that they are gone is collected from teachers and given to the student to complete by the time they come back (or on the actual day if it’s a paper you can turn in by email or another assignment that can be handed in online).

It’s hardly a vacation at all (though I’ve never gotten in a fight or been suspended, I only know policy).

The only trouble I ever got into was in elementary school when I found a pencil in the bathroom and started drawing pictures inside one of the stalls.
I loved drawing, and it was just a few stick figures, but they called me down to the principals office, sent letters home to my parents, and made me stay after to wash it off.

I think it would have been more effective if they had just sat me down and told me that it was just like how you can’t draw on walls at home; simply that they weren’t mine to draw on (and still made me wash it off, of course). But noooo…

please dont think I’m old or something I’m really not but back in my day…..*shudders that I just said that* in order to get suspention blood had to be drawn like a busted lip or something from a fight. This is why I always had my fights outside of school though once some random lady stepped out of her car on the other side of the street and shouted “leave that little white girl alone”…considering I was the only white girl in the neighboorhood we all stopped looked at her and yelled for her to get back in her car then just shrugged and forgot about the fight. I kicked a kid in the nuts once on the bus cause he was being a perv.